As we were entryng at a thropes ende, For while our Hoost, as he was wont to gye, As in this caas, our joly compaignye, Seyde in this wise: "Lordyngs, everichoon, Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon," etc.,
"Sir Prest," quod he, "artow a vicary? Or arte a persoun? Say soth, by thy fey, Be what thou be, _ne_ breke _thou_ nat oure pley; For every man, save thou, hath told his tale. Unbokele and schew us what is in thy male. Tel us a fable anoon, for cokkes boones!"
Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company that whatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of your light-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothing but grave and reverend prose.
This Persoun him answerede al at oones: Thou getest fable noon i-told for me.
(And you will presently observe that "fable" in the parson's mind means very much the same with verse or poetry, and that the whole business of fiction--that same fiction which has now come to occupy such a commanding place with us moderns, and which we are to study with such reverence under its form of the novel--implies downright lying and wickedness.)
Thou getist fable noon i-told for me; For Paul, that writeth unto Timothe, Repreveth hem that weyveth soothfastnesse. And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, etc.,
For which I say, if that yow list to heere Moralite and virtuous mateere,
(That is--as we shall presently see--_prose_).
And thanne that ye will geve me audience, I wol ful fayne at Cristes reverence, Do you pleasaunce leful, as I can; But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man, I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter, Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better; And therfor, if yow list, I wol not glose, I wol yow telle a mery tale in prose.
Here our honest parson, (and he was honest;) I am frightfully tempted to go clean away from my path and read that heart-filling description of him which Chaucer gives in the general Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_ sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction with the one contemptuous word "glose"--by which he seems to mean a sort of shame-faced lying all the more pitiful because done in verse--and sets up prose as the proper vehicle for "moralite and virtuous mateere."
With this idea of the function of prose, you will not be surprised to find, as I read these opening sentences of the pastor's so-called tale, that the style is rigidly sententious, and that the movement of the whole is like that of a long string of proverbs, which, of course, presently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The parson begins: